Standard Chartered Faces Inquiry Into Hong Kong Stock Sale

LONDON — Standard Chartered, a bank that is based in London and has extensive activities in Asia, said on Tuesday that it was facing an inquiry by regulators into its underwriting of a stock sale in Hong Kong.

The lender’s disclosure — the latest in a series of regulatory issues it has faced worldwide in recent years — comes after UBS said last week that it had been notified that the Securities and Futures Commission in Hong Kong planned to take action against the bank and some of its employees over UBS’s role as a sponsor on certain initial public offerings.

The Swiss bank said it could face fines or a “suspension of UBS’s ability to provide corporate finance advisory services in Hong Kong for a period of time.”

In the case of Standard Chartered, the Hong Kong regulator planned to take action over its role as a joint sponsor of an initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2009.

“If it does take action, there may be financial consequences,” Standard Chartered said in a news release. The bank did not provide further information on what stock offering was at issue.

William T. Winters, the lender’s chief executive, said that the inquiry related to a securities business that it ceased more than a year ago and that the “ongoing impact on our revenue is very limited.”

“I can’t comment on specific investigations beyond what we have disclosed,” he said.

Regulators in Hong Kong have taken a hard line against misleading or fraudulent stock market listings in recent years after a series of accounting failures and frauds, primarily involving companies from mainland China.

A Hong Kong inquiry would be the latest legacy regulatory issue to emerge as Mr. Winters seeks to turn around Standard Chartered’s prospects. The lender has faced increased regulatory scrutiny in the United States in recent years over its monitoring of suspicious transactions, and it has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in fines.

Last month, the bank disclosed that it had referred to regulators accusations of potential wrongdoing by officials at MAXpower Group, an Indonesian power company in which it is an investor.

Under a so-called deferred-prosecution agreement with United States authorities, Standard Chartered is required to report any potential wrongdoing to the Justice Department. At the same time, any additional misconduct could prompt prosecutors to revoke the deferred-prosecution agreement and force the bank to plead guilty.

The Hong Kong disclosure came as Standard Chartered reported its third-quarter results. Pretax profit fell 64 percent to $153 million from $430 million in the same period of 2015. Revenue declined 6 percent to $3.47 billion.